Best of Technical Support

I have a Red Hat 7.2 system with two physical drives, each
partitioned with three logical volumes. I have done something that
caused my main root partition to be read-only. I've checked the
directory permissions, and they are fine. But if I try to
vi or touch a file in root or anywhere in a root
subdir, I receive touch: creating 'test': Read-only file
system.

The output should include a Mounted on column with
a value of /. If it truly is mounted read-only, it is most likely
because you had some filesystem error. You should fix it before you
mount the partition read-write:

# fsck /dev/hda2

Replace /dev/hda2 with the entry under the Filesystem
column in the output of df. Finally, do this to mount the root
partition as read-write:

When my machine boots up in X, I get back what I think is the
KDE login manager. I would prefer to use GNOME's GDM, as it has
better features and is more customizable. How do I make GDM the
default X login manager?

I recently upgraded StarOffice from 5.2 to 6.0, and my system
can no longer access the network printers. The printers are HP
LaserJets with JetDirect cards, and they have their own IP
addresses. Using spadmin outputs only to a default printer; there
is no obvious way to specify an IP address. Looking at
psprint.config shows a location parameter but offers no
documentation saying how to set up an IP printer.

First, add the printers to the system using printtool and
specify JetDirect printer. Then, in spadmin, add the printer
definition for StarOffice. When you get to the print command
window, specify the printer in the command, for example:

This is a follow-up to the bulletproof backup/boot question
that appeared in Best of Technical Support in the January 2003
issue. LILO knows about the -R option, which basically means
“install this boot entry just once, then use default”. You may,
at an early boot stage, install your emergency mode with
lilo -R. At system shutdown (when all went well,
if you are picky after remounting / as read-only) you may
re-install your normal mode. So, if the box crashes unexpectedly
(or goes down quickly from, say, a forced reboot with
Ctrl-Alt-Delete), you come up in emergency mode.

How do I stick a Linux box into my Windows peer-to-peer
network? I have an existing Windows peer-to-peer network that
includes one Windows XP machine and three or four Windows 98
machines. They have fixed addresses in the 10.1.1.1-10.1.1.14
range. All the machines are completely shared, and there are no
passwords; I'm the only actual user most of the time. How do I make
the Windows machines see the drives on the Linux machine and vice
versa?

Samba can help with this task. Setting up Samba this way can
be confusing, however, because the documentation doesn't make it
clear from the first step that there are actually two halves to
this task. In Windows, client and server functionality is the same.
Once the network is up, you can browse other systems, and they can
browse yours. With Samba, each side has to access the other. Once
Samba is installed, it takes only a little work to access other
systems. You should be able to use the smbmount command to mount a
share from another system. In fact, if you have other name
resolution methods correctly installed, such as DNS, you generally
don't need to run nmbd and smbd. For permanent shares, you can add
a line to /etc/fstab that is similar to the following:

//machname/share /mountpt smbfs åusername=xxx,password=yyy 1 1

You do need to set the Linux machine up as a server
to enable other machines to access it. This is done by editing
smb.conf to define the basic server properties as well as the
shares to create. Then run nmbd and smbd to provide those services.
The trick to avoiding sometimes-messy PDC-related work is to
compile Samba such that it supports your normal password services.
You can then add users to your system normally and use the
smbpasswd utility to create the file Samba actually uses. It's a
relatively manual process (described in the “Unofficial HOWTO” at
www.samba.org), but it
does do the trick. If you want to browse as well as share, make
sure you add the guest or no-name account.

Various versions of Windows are a bit touchy with the Network
Neighborhood. The best thing to do is edit /etc/samba/smb.conf.
Make sure the “workgroup = line” matches your workgroup. Add a
“netbios name =” for the name of your machine. Depending on your
installation, the default passwords will be picked up from
/etc/password.

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Hello. My name is Tim Gershikov. I am an assistant network admin for Bass & Associates in tucson, AZ. We have a linux Red Hat computer that does not print one specific file only. We use mozilla to connect to internet, than adobe to read the files. I already downloaded a package of all the gentium fonts, but it didn't help. I believe there is a problem between the printer (HP 4000) and the fonts on postscript renderer. See, it opens the file and we can see it, but once we send it to the printer, it prints in squares. We also established that that file prints of Windows-based PC's that are running Mozilla, but not of Linux-based PC's. I was wondering if you could help me out, and tell me what do I need to download or do in order for me to fix this problem. Thank you so much for your time. My e-mail address is: tgershikov@bass-associates.com

Hello. My name is Tim Gershikov. I am an assistant network admin for Bass & Associates in tucson, AZ. We have a linux Red Hat computer that does not print one specific file only. We use mozilla to connect to internet, than adobe to read the files. I already downloaded a package of all the gentium fonts, but it didn't help. I believe there is a problem between the printer (HP 4000) and the fonts on postscript renderer. See, it opens the file and we can see it, but once we send it to the printer, it prints in squares. We also established that that file prints of Windows-based PC's that are running Mozilla, but not of Linux-based PC's. I was wondering if you could help me out, and tell me what do I need to download or do in order for me to fix this problem. Thank you so much for your time. My e-mail address is: tgershikov@bass-associates.com